Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I get a lot of text documents, which I open in Writer, edit and save as OO files. How can I set defaults for the page formatting (margins, paper size, etc.) so that when I open a text document the pages have those characteristics?

I set up a template for new documents which correctly formats the pages for me, but don't know how to apply this to existing text documents without having to copy and paste the text into a new document.

As far as I understand, what you need is to import styles from your template to an existing document:

1. Open your document.
2. Call up the Stylist (F11 or click on the respective toolbar button).
3. Click on the right-hand drop-down list and choose Load Styles.
4. Pick up your template, tick the respective boxes (text, frame, pages, bullets, numbering — what you need) and Replace.
5. Click OK. Done.

esperantisto wrote:As far as I understand, what you need is to import styles from your template to an existing document:

1. Open your document.
2. Call up the Stylist (F11 or click on the respective toolbar button).
3. Click on the right-hand drop-down list and choose Load Styles.
4. Pick up your template, tick the respective boxes (text, frame, pages, bullets, numbering — what you need) and Replace.
5. Click OK. Done.

Yes, that is the way to bring updated style definitions into a document, but it won't have an effect unless they update styles already in use. You're safe if the document being updated contains basic style definitions that map to style definitions you're importing, or contains styles of the same name as the ones you're importing. Default text styles from Word will map to default text styles in Writer, so those may update correctly, and if you open a Word document in Writer, the Default page style will automatically be used because Word doesn't have a page style equivalent (at least, not before Word 2007; and Office 2007 isn't yet compatible with OOo, so it still holds true), which means Writer must use something for a page style, so it uses the Default one.

But if the document being updated contains a lot of direct formatting or custom styles, these won't be changed by importing style definitions.

Thanks for the suggestion, but =uUsing the Stylist as suggested seems at least as much trouble as copying the text and pasting it into a new document, which has the defaults that I set.

Annice

annice wrote:Thanks for the suggestion, but =uUsing the Stylist as suggested seems at least as much trouble as copying the text and pasting it into a new document, which has the defaults that I set.

Either method can only use the styles available to it, so it's up to you which method you use. Some people find that importing styles works perfectly well and is easy to accomplish.

Just don't expect everything to translate perfectly because sometimes styles just don't match up or don't exist, or more often, direct formatting has been applied so even if you update the style, the appearance wouldn't change.